Monthly Archives: May 2012

I remember in high school someone spoke about drugs at an assembly and told a story about a friend who took his first hit of marijuana, thought he could fly, and jumped off the roof to his death, and somehow we all bought it. I can’t help but wonder what motivates people to give out such dramatic misinformation or how they can justify making a mockery of people who have actually died from drugs.

I’m sure as hell not trying to imply that Mitt Romney is a better choice, so please don’t misunderstand me, but this article clearly demonstrates how Obama is not fit to be president. He’s not only going against the wishes of the majority of the American population, the fact that he is attacking sick and dying patients and trying to take away the medicine they need to lead normal lives clearly shows that he does not have the common human decency necessary to be a good leader.

Around the turn of the century I started a website called Get to Know a Marijuana Dealer, where I announced that I sold marijuana and that I was not willing to quit, as a protest against drug laws. The site became kinda popular, but didn’t quite have the political affect I was hoping for. I was never busted for selling weed after starting the site, (though I was once busted before, which is what inspired me to start it) despite running the site for seven or eight years. Eventually I forgot to renew my domain name and an advertising bot stole it from me.

Anyway, I think I’m going to start posting some of the stuff I had on that old site, maybe just for the sake of my old memories. Here’s some of what I had on the introduction page:

I am a peace-loving marijuana dealer, science fiction novelist and web developer, designer and programmer. I run this website to tell everyone that I sell marijuana to my friends and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop me. Criminal laws are worthless and it’s high time humans stop thinking about legal and illegal and starting thinking about right and wrong.

…

The legalization of marijuana is not just about a bunch of hippies wanting to get high. It’s an integral part of world politics, that wastes countless dollars and innocent lives. Weed is a peace-promoting plant that has never killed a human. And it’s a plant that can help change the way you look at life.

The problem is that we pot smokers aren’t standing up for ourselves. We’re forced into a life of hiding and deception, instead of standing up and shouting “Fuck you! This is our god-given right!” like we should be.

So it’s time to stand up and smoke on the street at the bus stop; it’s time to smoke out the geeky kid in the back of the class; it’s time to smoke out your parents and your teachers and tell everyone that you demand your freedom.

I didn't like to have my name indexed by search engines so I put my real name inside images like this one so the police would still know who I was if they wanted to arrest me.

…but also… smoke responsibly.

…because it’s also time to show the people around us that drug users can contribute to society, can behave like responsible adults, can use drugs in a way that positively benefits their life, and can have solid moral values.

…it’s time to stop lying and sneaking. Morally solid individuals are above that.

Let me put it to you this way: I’ve been telling the world that I sell pot since June of 2000; and I’m helping change people’s opinions.

Now, If you’re a person who can’t even tell the people that you love that you smoke pot… well… Just stop and think about that for a moment. Think about the affect your lies will have on you and the people around you in the long run.

The site ultimately became most popular for my book, The Beginner’s Guide to Marijuana Distribution where I unloaded all the advice I had on how to get into the field and stay safe and profitable. I plan to post that book on this site as well, since it’s still probably the most popular thing I’ve ever written.

So I have about fifty unpublished or incomplete posts and pages sitting in my queue for this blog and I feel like I need to clean things up a bit, so here is one that I found sitting around that I think has some decent points. I had a bunch more stuff to say on this subject, but my mind has wandered in the year since I wrote this, so I’m just going to post it as-is.

I once had an argument with someone about gay marriage and he claimed that gays already had equal rights because they have the right to get straight married. He thought it was ridiculous to claim that gays were not equal because the laws are applied in the exact same way regardless of your sexual orientation.

If you have two children, one who is obsessed with trains, the other who loves dinosaurs, you could take both of them to nothing but train related outings, but that wouldn’t be treating them equal, even if you’re giving them both the exact same things along the way. You’d be treating them the same, but clearly they wouldn’t be equal because they have different interests and different feelings. Instead, they should be treated differently but equally.

These are two extreme examples, though the first is actually a common belief among conservatives. However, I think this same basic concept applies to aspects of society in many other ways that we don’t always stop to think about. When you start thinking about laws and certain social expectations in this manner, suddenly our society is not even as equal as we thought it was.

Take marijuana laws as just one example. Marijuana is notorious for giving different people different effects. Some get hungry, some silly, some have an easier time focusing, for some it becomes harder, it feels wonderful to some and uncomfortable or even scary for others. Different people have different chemical makeups but our laws disregard this fact. In this sense, people who have certain mental or chemical tendencies are clearly not being treated equal.

You can say something similar about fines and many other types of punishments. On the surface it seems fair to impose a flat fine for a certain infraction, but when you stop to think about it, the harm from that fine is greater for a poor person than it is for a wealthy one. The actual physical action is the exact same regardless of wealth, but the effect on the person’s life can be vastly different.

To me it’s not the action that’s important, but the end result. It means nothing if two people are technically equal if they don’t feel equal because their emotions or culture are different. Ultimately it’s our feelings, not our possessions, that’s truly important.

Originally I wanted to focus on relationships between men and women for this post, but I kind of got sidetracked because this concept is a big reason why I’m anarchist.

I saw a blog post a number of months ago at blaghag.com, (I no longer read this blog after Elevatorgate but I used to be a big fan) and there was some talk about the Old Spice guy–the hot black guy, “I’m on a horse”–and Jen (or someone she was quoting; I can’t remember and can’t seem to find the post) was using this as an example of how men have to deal with the same kind of sexual objectification that women do, and it hurts us just as it does women. I found this a little offensive and felt it illuminated the fact that the author did not understand how men think and feel and made the assumption that underneath we are all the same. Men have many complaints about many things relating to sexuality, but some hot guy selling cologne is not one of them.

Sexual objectification is a women’s issue and I don’t think it’s fair to pretend like it affects men in the same way. In many ways men feel the opposite. Men tend to enjoy being sexually objectified and it usually makes us feel better about ourselves, not worse. Women are under no emotional obligation to avoid this kind of thing while men certainly are.

Same thing with safety. Men are under a very real obligation to avoid scaring women, which we can see from the drama surrounding Elevatorgate, even if we have no way of knowing or understanding why they are afraid. Those kind of emotions are foreign to most men, and it takes a ton of effort to remember to be sensitive to them twenty-four-seven, but it’s still our obligation. For women, on the other hand, as long as you’re not pointing a weapon, you really don’t need to give a crap about men’s feelings of safety. We don’t need you to.

With these issues, women who follow The Golden Rule with their dealings with men, are actually hurting men rather than helping them. Sometimes it’s not right to treat others the way you want to be treated. It’s better to take the time to understand the other person and treat them the way they want to be treated.

So I feel like if men are under these obligations that women are not, I think it’s fair to ask for a couple other concessions in exchange for these things, things that women might have no idea are hurtful to men. I’m not sure what the male community would decide we want those concessions to be since I’m far from a typical male and I don’t listen to male-oriented talk shows or read about men’s issues. I can guess, however, that we’d ask for things like making your sexual intentions clear and not tricking us into being friends when you know we have a romantic interest, not calling us creeps without a fair or at least clearly defined reason, or not inviting us into your bed only to tell us sex is out of the question.

If you look at BlagHag’s statistics, for example, you can see that more than half of her readers are men, and yet it’s a feminist blog. Granted, it’s more about atheism and science, but feminism is definitely a big player. For every male issue I’ve discussed or read about in my life, I’ve probably read or discussed five women’s issue. I have a feeling this is somewhat typical of liberal males, but I have a feeling the opposite is not true for liberal women. I feel like (and I’ll admit this is just a feeling without scientific basis) women in my liberal area (Seattle, Washington), and particularly feminists, tend to put a lot of faith in The Golden Rule and don’t acknowledge that men’s thoughts and feelings work very differently from theirs, and don’t realize the men around them may be hurting from things women can’t identify with. Perhaps this is because women are rarely exposed to these issues in non-confrontational settings. Men have no choice but to come to terms with our differences because it’s made so obvious to us, so in a lot of ways it’s our own fault for not speaking out about men’s issues in the way women speak out about their’s and making the information accessible to women.

This is an excellent article about the effects and morality of politically-motivated vandalism. I personally don’t see how this is any worse than the Boston Tea Party of American history, but I also thought I’d share one guy’s response.

Fascinating stuff here. It’s odd that someone who talks about “Real Americans” is also advocating that the state murder protesters instead of addressing their grievances. I know this guy is just a troll, but these attitudes are real. People actually feel this way. Alan Carter (I can only assume that’s not his real name as his Facebook account is mostly empty) is so fed up that he’s using any excuse he can to promote hatred and real violence, while many others in our society follow along with this kind of attitude, because it satisfies their basic animal instincts. We all have this blood lust as products of brutal evolution, but in evolutionary history, there has always been serious consequences for violence. In our current society, however, police give the public the means to feel as though they are the ones beating and torturing people, and gives them that terrifyingly addictive satisfaction of vengeance. Most supporters of police are not as blatant and honest about this as Alan was, and most don’t even realize its their blood lust that drives them to support guns and prisons, but that doesn’t mean they don’t feel the same way Alan does.

This is a fascinating look at religion in politics and the weird system we’ve created where people claim to believe all this crazy stuff, but then don’t act on it or put any real faith in it. I think the number of people who actually believe in God in the United States is quite low and when people argue for religion, they are trying to convince themselves more than anyone else.